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User blog:RJ Long/The more things change, the more they stay the same
The following is the Foreword from the sixth edition of the Commodore Products Source List, published in August 1997. Over a year later, not much has changed. The Amiga went through another transition, from Escom in Germany over to Gateway (formerly Gateway 2000) in South Dakota with an aborted detour through VIScorp in Chicago. Note: the rights to the Commodore 8-bit line (C64, etc.) belong to a company called Tulip somewhere over in Europe. Details to follow. I'm still trying to meet all my deadlines, self-imposed or not, and not making all of them. Yup, not much has changed. And yet, everything has changed. Change #1: Expansion New products continue to be made for a supposedly "dead" computer. Last year we saw the introduction of faxing software, gigabyte hard drives, a 20 MHz accelerator, and an interface to drive a modem at 230.4 Kbps. Name any other system where you can spend $200 and get a 20x performance increase. Can you take an IBM 386 system and upgrade it to a Pentium MMX level, run a benchmark program, see a result of 20x higher than it was before, all for $200? No. That ain't all, folks. In the next 12 months, we can look forward to a SuperCPU accelerator specifically for the C128, memory expansion with 16 megabytes of continuous memory (ask any IBM user about the 640K DOS barrier and you'll see why this is a big deal), and a new version of GEOS. More work has also been done on adapting the TCP/IP protocol of the Internet to the Commodore, with rumors of a HTML-based browser program. Change #2: Rebirth Guess who is the typical new owner of a Commodore system these days? Someone who owned one many years ago. Besides new people finding them at thrift stores, many of the people who owned a C64 or C128 back in the 1980s are rediscovering them. Many of them said they got rid of the Commodore and went on to "a real computer". Now, however, they find that they miss the ole Commie and either go out and buy a full system from a thrift store or else run one of the many C64 emulators that are available for the Amiga, IBM, Mac or other system. Or it’s the other way round: they get the emulator and then find out how much they miss the C64. Today's C64 emulators work very well. If you don't have a real C64, they do quite well in masquerading as one. Given a fast enough machine, they will even run faster than a stock C64. Put a SuperCPU on a C64 however, and it would take at least a 400 MHz Pentium II IBM (which doesn't exist yet) with 64 megabytes of RAM to equal its speed. Change #3: World-wide recognition I mentioned last year that the Internet allowed me to gather more information easier for the Products List. Since then, its grown even more, and many more Commodore-specific sites have been put up. Some of these sites, however, are using HTML commands (the language that describes how a web page should look) that would only be accessible on an IBM or Mac. Go figure. What else is there? A book entitled The Internet for Commodore Users, now in its second revision, describes how to connect to the Internet with your Commodore. User groups put club info and/or back issues of their newsletter on the Internet for all to see. Even Yahoo!, one of the most widely-known search engines, has a section specifically for the Commodore. Change is good. Last year, I put the Products List up on the Internet both to make it easier to access worldwide and to make it easier to update. Since then, I've logged many hundreds of hours. A majority of those were spent waiting for web pages to finish loading all their fancy graphics. And sounds. And music. And Java scripts. Most of which don't really do anything for the page. At the same time, I've also seen that my pages looked a little bland. So, they're getting a face-lift. Centering to make things look classy. Header graphics for the major sections to add a little bit of color. (If anyone can tell me why the transparency isn't working on those graphics, I'd appreciate it.) Little things that won't slow down reading the pages. (After writing up the "bandwidth-friendly" pledge, I better not break my own rule.) In the past, I’ve kept my focus to North America. With the author of the aforementioned book being in Australia, that may change. And, there are a number of Internet-only places that contain valuable information. Who knows what next year's List will look like. I still don’t know what this year's List will look like! So, let me know what you think. Category:Pastwords Category:Blog posts